A Famous American artist – Georgia O’ Keeffe (1887-1986) and her flower paintings.

Georgia O’Keeffe

was a famous American artist,

who specialized in painting

large, colourful drawings of flowers up close.

Georgia O'Keeffe in my Camera
Creative Commons License Photo Credit: Bob Marquart via Compfight

She was born in 1887

in Wisconsin in the USA.

A day in the life
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She lived on a farm, 

with nature all around.

 

As a child she didn’t like school,

but she loved art

and by the age of ten

she knew she wanted to be an artist.

 

She moved to Virginia

when she started secondary school.

Her drawings were greatly admired

by her friends and her teachers.

 

After leaving school,

Georgia went to art college in Chicago.

But she got seriously ill with typhoid.

When she recovered, over a year later,

she went to study art in New York.

 

In 1912, she returned to Virginia

to continue with her studies

Georgia became an art teacher.

She experimented with painting

in many different ways

before she developed her

own special way of painting.

 

In 1916, a photographer named Alfred Stieglitz

put some of her paintings in his gallery without telling her.

At first Georgia was upset, but she forgave him.

Alfred Stieglitz helped make Georgia’s paintings famous.

They got married.

 

They bought a house on a lake

They lived there during the summers.

It was here that Georgia began painting

the close-ups of flowers in bright, bold colors

that she is now most famous for.

Georgia O'Keeffe
Creative Commons License Photo Credit: rocor via Compfight

This was new. We see lots of pictures like this now.

But at the time, only photographers had taken pictures like this.

No-one had ever painted such detailed close-ups of flowers before

 

In her later life Georgia moved to New Mexico.

She painted the desert,

the mountains,

and the adobe houses.

 

She especially loved to paint pictures

of desert landscape and animal skulls.

okeeffe notebooking  gallery
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She continued to paint until she lost her eyesight.

She was ninety-eight years old when she died in 1986.

w9 - Georgia O'Keeffe
Photo Credit: Barbara via Compfight

We first learned about Georgia O’Keeffe’s

when we saw her famous painting, ‘The Lawrence Tree’.

We painted our own trees inspired by her’s HERE.